Apologies

Day & Night requires WebGL
to render its graphics but it appears that either your hardware or Web browser
do not support it.
Try accessing this site from a different machine.

Day & Night requires a WebVR-capable Web browser.
Fortunately these browsers are free.
See the
WebVR info website for details and download links.

Day & Night requires a VR head-mounted display (HMD) such as the
HTC Vive
but there does not appear to be any virtual reality headset attached to your machine.
Check your headset’s connections and try again.

View in VR

VR engaged

Jump into outer-space to witness the sun bathe one hemisphere of Earth in daylight as the sleeping side twinkles with its own artificial lights of night.

Has your child asked what makes day and night? How can it be morning on one side of Earth but evening on another? Show them.
Day & Night is an educational virtual reality experience for children using WebVR to explore how sunshine creates our most basic unit of time.

Kid Comfort

Is your VR device room-scale?
Then adjusting the position and scale of this virtual solar system is a snap.
Are the earth and moon floating too high above the floor for your child to see comfortably?
Hold down the main trigger on either controller and push, drag, or rotate the entire universe around you
as if you were clicking and dragging with a mouse.

Need to shrink down the universe to better fit your space?
Hold down two controller triggers at the same time to pinch, zoom, and rotate the space around you.

Requirements

Day & Night supports the
HTC Vive,
Oculus Rift,
Google Daydream
and similar VR devices.
(We recommend the HTC Vive for a superior experience. The graphics for phone-based experiences will necessarily be throttled down to accommodate their capabilities.)
If the earth does not appear in your VR goggles after clicking the “View in VR” button,
try tapping it again to disengage, and then again to re-engage.
It’s still early days for WebVR. Your pioneer spirit is appreciated.

Colophon

Day & Night is the first edition of the Virtual Reality Learning Series,
created by Stewart Smith
and brought to you by Moar, a virtual reality consultancy in Brooklyn, New York.
For more information read Stewart’s Day & Night post on Medium
or direct your questions and comments to @stew_rtsmith on Twitter.

This is a WebVR Experiment.
Thanks to NASA and other parties for providing license-free textures of our solar system to the public.
Thanks to the authors of Three.js for their fine toolkit and code examples.
Finally, thanks to HTC, Valve, and the browser keepers who make delivering VR over the Web possible.
Caution, kids! Day & Night is not suitable for celestial navigation.
While the heavenly bodies represented here are more or less to scale, the radii and nature of their orbits are not.